Let me start by saying, I think coaching is a superpower. If you saw the title of my article and felt furious, know this: this article isn’t me knocking the coaching profession.
However…
Thomas Leonard chose the title ‘life coach’ to describe his innovative approach with his clients. Leonard was a financial planner who noticed a pattern. His clients weren’t reaching their financial goals – not because they couldn’t budget, but for deeper reasons. He wanted to understand why, so he developed a way of asking questions and gently challenging his clients to get to the root of the problem. This became coaching.
Even then, in the late 80s and early 90s, Leonard’s approach was enquiry-based. He wasn’t teaching budgeting techniques; he was uncovering what was stopping people by asking lots of open questions and “ life planner’ and then ‘coach’ seemed like reasonable shorthand for this new service.
Professional coaching has spent nearly three decades refining that questioning approach. We’ve developed sophisticated methodologies around powerful questions, active listening, and non-directive facilitation. We’ve moved even further from teaching and advice-giving.
Yet we’re still stuck with Leonard’s job title.
The Expectation Problem
Think about every coach your potential clients know or may have known. Their tennis coach demonstrates the perfect backhand, then watches them practise it. Their driving instructor tells them to check mirrors, explains driving theory, and corrects mistakes. A business coach shares frameworks, provides templates, and teaches strategies they’ve used with other clients.
Every coach your prospects encounter follows the same pattern: they possess knowledge, they transfer that knowledge, and they guide application. They’re the expert and the client is the student.
This is what potential clients expect when you say ‘I’m a coach.’ They’re primed for knowledge transfer from an expert, but that’s not what we do. We don’t position ourselves as the expert on their life. We don’t teach or transfer knowledge, yet we use the same job title that describes everyone who does precisely that.
The Commercial Impact
This expectation mismatch doesn’t just kill sales conversations – it cripples your entire client acquisition approach.
Scroll through any coach’s LinkedIn content. You’ll find post after post explaining why ‘real coaching’ isn’t like other coaching. There will be lengthy descriptions of the coaching process – the listening, the questioning, the space-holding. In short, you’ll find lots of content about coaching methodology and very little (if anything) about its value to a potential client.
Because here’s the thing – nobody buys a process. They buy solutions to problems.
I often hear that the coaching profession is saturated, which makes it sound like we’re all in competition with each other for diminishing numbers of clients. The real issue isn’t competition, it’s invisibility. People know exactly what a tennis coach does, so they know when they need one. The same applies to driving instructors, business trainers, or music teachers. The service is clear, so the need is obvious.
However, when you call yourself a ‘coach’ without the specific qualifier, people have no idea what problem you solve. And so we desperately try to clarify by adding words: mindset coach, transformation coach, change coach, life coach.
None of these make the meaning any clearer to people who aren’t coaches. Worse, they’re just describing what coaching already is – mindset work, transformation, change. We are layering coaching jargon on top of a confusing title, making the problem worse, not better.
We’re still forced into endless process explanations, and even with qualifiers, people still can’t identify when they might need your services.
Try explaining why your ‘coaching’ costs £150 per hour when their business coach charges £50. The title forces us into pricing conversations we can’t win, because we’re defending a premium for a service they think they already understand.
Why Job Titles Don’t Work for You
Here’s the thing about job titles: they exist to position people within organisational hierarchies. HR departments need to slot employees into pay grades, reporting structures, and functional boxes. A job title tells everyone where you sit in the pecking order and what you’re responsible for.
The thing is, when we set up our coaching businesses, we don’t work for anyone else, we work for ourselves. We ARE the hierarchy.
When one is self-employed, a job title serves no functional purpose. We’re not part of someone else’s organisational chart. We don’t need to signal our position relative to colleagues or justify our place in a company structure. Yet we cling to job titles because we’ve always had one. From school to university to employment, there’s always been a title to define us. So having one feels not just essential, but like an unquestioned necessity. The idea of existing professionally without a job title feels impossible.
The problem is that when we introduce ourselves as a coach, we immediately create confusion about what we do. Then we spend the next five minutes explaining why we’re not that kind of coach, and disappear down a rabbit hole of describing what our process involves, and how our approach differs from that of other coaches.
We end up with an albatross of a job title, a concept that was never designed for self-employed professionals, simply because we can’t imagine not having one.
The Solution: Your Golden Sentence
Stop using a job title and use a Golden Sentence instead. The format is simple: ‘I work with X, to help them Y, so that they can Z.’
X is your target audience – the specific type of person you serve. Y is the problem they have that working with you can address, and Z is the outcome they want to achieve.
I work with VPs in financial services to help them move to top-tier firms so they can accelerate their career progression.
I work with small business owners to help them overcome decision paralysis so they can scale their operations confidently.
I work with new managers in healthcare to help them handle difficult conversations so they can build high-performing teams.
Can you see the difference?
There’s no lengthy explanation about methodology and no need to be defensive about why you’re different from other coaches – just clarity about who you serve, what problem you solve, and what they gain.
A Golden Sentence immediately tells people whether they might need your services. A VP in financial services facing a career transition knows instantly if you’re relevant. A small business owner paralysed by decisions recognises their problem. A new manager dreading difficult conversations sees precisely what you offer.
Even better, people with different job titles will see the clarity in your message and you’ll start to have conversations that go ‘I’m not a VP in financial services, but otherwise, you’re talking about me, do you work with people like me too?’
You won’t be trapped explaining your process, because you’ll be speaking directly to problems people recognise they have. When someone recognises their problem in your words – and it’s a big problem – they don’t question your rates, they just want to know how quickly you can help.
If you’re wondering how to apply this to your coaching practice, may I offer you some help? My free, 4-day challenge, Nail Your Niche, is running again soon, and you can register here: https://thecoachingrevolution.com/nailyourniche
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